Strategic Initiative Summits

Synergies Around Bold Ideas

At KU, our core mission is to educate leaders, build healthy communities, and make discoveries that will change the world. While our mission is comprehensive, we have a tremendous opportunity and obligation to develop synergies across several parts of the university where we have particularly strong combined strength and potential.

Our four strategic initiative themes offer stellar opportunities to enhance our research excellence and visibility by addressing emerging and escalating grand challenges of crucial significance both for Kansas and globally.

A key aspect of the strategic plan is the focused investment in some big, bold ideas where KU can harness its unique assets to help make the world a better place. The four strategic initiative themes — referenced earlier but presented here in more detail — grew out of a bottom-up response to a campus-wide request for proposals. The objectives were several:

To address emerging and escalating global grand challenges and societal issues where KU has special capabilities;

To build scholarly communities that challenge, engage, and inspire individuals from many disciplines around a common theme;

To enhance KU's national and international visibility and impact;

To engage and motivate funding agencies, foundations, state government, community, alumni, and friends to provide much-needed resources; and

To provide our students with unique experiences that will position them as highly recruited and valued drivers and innovators of social and technological change.

A total of 104 proposals were submitted by February 28, 2011. A full vetting of the proposals, as described in the introduction of this document, resulted in the following four strategic initiative themes and the co-chairs who have agreed to form planning groups to organize and convene the summit.

These themes represent KU's highest priorities for research investment during the coming five years. Each theme statement is described in more detail in the following pages and includes a set of "bold exemplars" derived from some of the submitted proposals.

During the 2011–2012 academic year, each strategic initiative theme will be the subject of an open, on-campus summit. The format for these meetings is now taking shape, and faculty members have been chosen to plan and lead them. The summits will help form research networks, identify funding opportunities and faculty leaders, strategize about needed infrastructure, and inform priorities for future faculty hiring.